InttraStats, a source of real-times statistics on the global language industry, has issued a warning about the rising level of information pollution caused by machine translation.

Franz Josef Och, who heads Google’s machine translation group, recently(1) stated “What all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, Google translates in roughly a single day. By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate.”

That is a remarkable achievement, and of considerable use in breaking down linguistic and cultural barriers. What Google and other purveyors of machine translation systems did not anticipate, however, is the degree to which machine translation is now used not for private but for public communication, with serious implications in terms of the quantities of erroneous information available on the web.

People translate what they do not understand or cannot express in another language. But because they do not understand the foreign language, they cannot know if the result of their translation is accurate or not.

Although this creates problems when machine translation is used for private purposes, the problems are private as well. The real issue is the use of machine translation for public communication, when the results are not checked, proof-read and corrected by professional translators before being published. More.

See: Kontax

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